CS Video and Planetarium Show w/Timothy Ferris

Citizen Sky is now officially permanent part of the AAVSO. In the coming weeks we will be moving additional content to the AAVSO site and freezing this site as an archive of the 1st three years of the project. Please visit the new landing page for future updates.

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Hi, all. We are very excited about this announcement. We have just released a new, 6-minute video presentation describing eclipsing binary stars, light curves and the Citizen Sky project. It was produced by the California Academies of Science and is narrated by the one-and-only Timothy Ferris. This is especially exciting to me personally because seeing his film "Creation of the Universe" is one of the reasons I fell in love with astronomy.

The video was designed and produced to be a short movie trailer to be shown at planetariums before their regular, feature presentation. Click here or on a screen shot to view it via YouTube. It is also available in just about any video format you may need for regular TV, movie theatre or full-dome presentation (including high definition, H.264, 5.1 surround sound, etc.) for just about any planetarium technology. It is free for most uses and released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. Feel free to show the video at any event, including local star parties, club meetings, classes, etc. Also, please help promote it via blogs and such. :) And if any planetarium/museum would like the full high resolution version, contact us and we'll coordinate how to deliver it to you.

This is a very professionall produced video made by some of the best award-winning science visualizers on the planet. It was directed by Ryan Wyatt, the Director of the Morrison Planetarium at the California Academies. (BTW, this is also where our 2nd workshop will be held this September.) We would like to thank Ryan and his staff for their hard work. Of course, we'd also like to thank Timothy Ferris for donating his time as well.

Please, feel free to comment and ask questions about the video via this thread. Ryan spoke a little about the video and his philosophy about science visualization at the last workshop. We have video of his talk on this page.

Update: Higher resolution versions of the video are now available via the following links.

These are very large files and the Citizen Sky download pipe is not superfast. If you work for a planetarium, museum and/or would like to show them in a public setting (such as at a star party, amateur club night, school, etc.) then contact us and we'll be happy to send them to you on a video DVD.

Thanks for the suggestion. I edited the post and added links to the video in 3 different formats. If anyone does show this to a group of any type and size, please let us know by commenting here or using our "Contact Us" form. This will help us greatly when we report back to the NSF, who funded this video.

We've ordered about 10 external hard drives that we are going to load the full-dome, high-def video on to ship out to planetariums willing to show the trailer. The HDs should be arriving at the CalAcademies today or Monday. The Cal Academies are largely in charge of assembling that list and distributing it. However, if anyone reading this is interested in showing the trailer please post here or e-mail us and we will make sure you get a copy in some manner. Anyone who reads this and sends a request will get priority! If we run out of HDs, we plan to put the super large files on a cloud server somewhere so people can download them (free, of course). Regarding the MPEG full-dome video, I asked Ryan Wyatt (the trailer director) yesterday if he can provide us with that.If so, then I'll put it online and post it here. If not, then we'll include that in a HD and send it to you.

prokosch

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Posted: August 14, 2010 - 12:31am

Yea! Include us on the list then :) Let me know what information you need for the list. Mike Prokosch S.H.S.U. Planetarium

FYI: We just started distribution of the hard drives. The shows themselves were sent to the various planetarium vendors about a month ago. Click here for more information.

edmond4850

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Posted: November 17, 2010 - 12:18am

What a wonderful video! :~) I am in charge of an astronomical association of a Middle school.I think this isa verygood videotopromote citizen science in our class,and even in our school? But thereis a problem that though I downloaded the HQfile (383M) butmy QuickTimePlayer didn't play. So could you tell me whatto do? Toask for a DVD orother way? Thanks! CQS

Thanks for the complements - we are very proud of the video. I will have someone contact you by email to try to sort out your issues with the downloaded file. If we can't figure it out we will send you a DVD. One way or another we'll get it to you! Best wishes, Rebecca